Location: Shirley, New York
Climate Zone: 7a
Size: 23’x52′
Application: Commercial, Educational
Technologies: SunSense™, wetwall, GAHT®
Date Completed: 2025
Birdsfoot Farm, part of the 300-acre Avalon Nature Preserve in Shirley, New York, on Long Island, just finished its first winter and spring with a new Ceres greenhouse. In one season, it became the engine behind an acre of vegetables, a half-acre of flowers, and a much more reliable way to cure the farm’s allium crops.
Project Overview
Birdsfoot Farm sits on just under 50 acres within the Avalon Nature Preserve and has been in production for about five years. Its Ceres greenhouse, a HighYield™ Kit attached to a barn/headhouse, was completed in August 2025, making this past winter and spring its first full season of use.
Birdsfoot is a diversified operation, producing cut flowers, vegetables, eggs, wool, meat, chickens, fruit, and honey. The greenhouse’s primary job is seedling production: the farm grows tens of thousands of seed plugs there each season to stock its outdoor beds. By the end of May, those starts had filled an acre of vegetable production and a half acre of flower production on the property, all traced back to what was grown in the greenhouse over the winter and early spring.
Multi-Use Functionality
Ryan, the Farm Manager, explained how the farm adapts the greenhouse’s environment for curing rather than growing:
“We can toggle the temperature settings so we can allow the greenhouse to get warmer than we would normally let it get, with the fan circulating moist air. And we’ll use our dehumidifier to suck the moisture out of the air at a quicker rate.”
That combination cuts down on mold and bacteria forming on the curing onions and shallots and produces a cleaner, more presentable final product. It’s the same structure doing two very different jobs, seedling nursery in winter and spring, curing room (for alliums) in summer, without sitting idle in between.
Tangible Benefit: A Consistent Environment That Changed the Season
Asked about the difference the greenhouse made, Ryan didn’t hesitate:
“This late winter and spring was so much easier than our previous years producing seedlings. The consistency was off the charts. Very reliable environment to grow our seedlings and force our flowers.”
For a farm that had previously grown seedlings without a dedicated, climate-controlled structure, that reliability translated directly into results: an acre of vegetables and a half-acre of flowers, sold through their CSA, went into the ground this spring on the strength of healthy, consistent starts—not a lucky stretch of weather.
Educational and Operational Value
Birdsfoot is still figuring out how to make full use of the space year-round. Ryan’s goal is to keep the greenhouse productive in every season, filling slower stretches with other beneficial or cash crops as the farm learns what works. Starting this winter, that also means opening the greenhouse as an educational space. The farm will offer container planting classes and wreath-making courses during the months when production naturally slows down. As Ryan put it, the aim with any piece of infrastructure is to maximize its use so that “every day we can use the greenhouse to be producing or preparing or storing a crop,” and now, teaching.
Watch our greenhouse tour below.
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